Seoul—Korean for “capital”—had been a capital city in the region well before it adopted its apt name.

Settled in Paleolithic times six millennia ago, the region’s history as an urban center began with the initiation of Korea’s Three Kingdom’s Period.  As the capital of the Paekche Kingdom until 660, the city was then known as Wirye-Song. 

When the Shilla conquered two of the three kingdoms, including Paekche, the city was renamed once more to Hanyang-gun.  Then, with the commencement of the Koryo Dynasty, it was referred to as Yangju, and later to Namgyong.

The city gained political (and moniker) stability with the advent of the Chosun Dynasty, as the capital was renamed once more to Hanyang.  The king of a more unified Korea, King Yi Song-Gye, brought his court—replete with shrines, palaces, hundreds of thousands of workers, and a heavily fortified wall—to modern-day Seoul in 1394.

The population steadily grew from over 100,000 to around 200,000 until the nineteenth century, when industrialization and global trends lent economic boom, diversity, and a cosmopolitan flair to the region. 

In 1910, Japan annexed Korea, and today’s Seoul was then called Kyongsong and its inhabitants numbered nearly 750,000.  Korean as a language was made illegal, and its denizen were forced to change their names to Japanese equivalents.

Seoul regained independence and took on its modern name at the close of WWII.  The Korean War, however, reduced the city to rubble, as it had been taken thrice, and it would be a couple decades of miraculous labor and development before the city before the city would be more than what it had once been.  Expanded in square mileage and skyrocketing in population to over ten million, Seoul’s recent history has closed with it hosting the Olympic Games in the eighties and undergoing heavy industrialization while simultaneously working to curb urban pollution and congestion.